Music
I started playing blues and folk music on the acoustic guitar in the third grade. My music trajectory developed in fits and starts. I had a (truncated) music education at Belmont University and played rock guitar throughout Nashville and the midwest during my college years. After that I put the guitar down, spending the next five years in graduate school, trying to figure out what role music would have in my life. I found the answers to that question where I least expected it: in historic archives in Brazil.
Conducting research in São Paulo, Brazil, from 2012-2015 allowed me to study the role of music in social life and in politics. I started to see a world in which music didn't need to be abused as a means toward validation or vanity. It's better used to strengthen the bonds of community, to help listeners work through tension, and as way to immortalize moments in song. It was then that I returned to the guitar, this time with 7 strings instead of 6.
Being in Brazil gave me the chance to study under three amazing mentors: Jefferson Motta, Tabajara Belo, and (much later) Cesar Garabini. The work allowed me to put together a broad repertoire of tunes in voicings that are at once Brazil's and my own. That repertoire includes tunes from genres spanning the 20th century: instrumental chorinho from the 1920s/30s, roots samba from the 40s/50s, cool bossa nova from the 60s, and the MPB protest tunes of the 70s/80s, Here below, you can see a couple samples of solo work followed by instagram reels of shows I have played recently..
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